Right-Wing Ivy Leaguers Try to Derail Juan Cole Appointment

Posted on Apr 19, 2006

The liberal U. of Michigan historian and outspoken Bush administration critic is reportedly close to receiving a tenured teaching position at Yale University. But a group of conservatives, led by a Yale and a Harvard student, are trying to queer the deal by painting Cole as anti-Semitic.

One of the most annoying victim movements around is the petulant and growing group, led by the odious David Horowitz, which incessantly whines that pro-Bush students on college campuses are treated very, very unfairly because their views are not praised by all that many people and sometimes are even harshly criticized.

As I’ve written about many times before, the examples of supposed victimhood almost never entail any actual repression of, or institutional punishment for, the expression of unpopular conservative views, but rather, are composed only of disagreement by other students and faculty members which make the right-wing students feel uncomfortable and unloved. In that regard, this whiny movement is nothing more than the mirror image of the worst elements of the PC movement of the 1990s—while deceitfully parading under the banner of free expression, its true aim is to render impermissible the expression of political views which the conservative students dislike.

A vivid example illustrating their true agenda can be found in the blossoming “controversy” over what appears to be the imminent offer of a tenured professorship by Yale University to liberal Professor of Mideast Studies (and well-read blogger) Juan Cole, to teach at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and in the Yale History Department. Many Bush supporters are arguing that Professor Cole espouses political views which apparently ought to be off-limits on college campuses, and there is thus a burgeoning movement to induce Yale to reconsider its decision. These efforts, of course, are coming from many of the same circles of sermoniziers who hold themselves out as defenders of academic freedom when they decry the oh-so-terrible reception which greets right-wing views on some campuses.

Juan Cole, a liberal University of Michigan historian and outspoken Bush administration critic, is reportedly close to receiving a tenured teaching position at Yale University—but not if a motivated group of conservatives has anything to say about it.